the market to enjoy the associated cost reductions of higher voltages while maintaining the safety of installing UL
certifed equipment. TMEIC’s experience in other medi-um- and high-voltage industries gave us the background
necessary to understand the risk factors that are inherent in the 1500V PV market and to design solar inverters
that are reliable, safe, and cost effective. By achieving the
UL1741 certifcation in the 1500V version of our Samurai
series of inverters, TMEIC has removed one of the largest
hurdles in the advancement of the 1500VDC PV market.
Applied Energy Technologies (AET) has a strong foundation in the industry and we have been involved in many

1500-volt system designs recently. The 1500-volt systemreduces costs as compared to a traditional 1000-volt sys-tem by reducing component counts across the project. String sizes can be increased by nearly 50 percent, thusreducing wiring, equipment and labor costs. System archi-tecture in all of AET’s products is fexible, so the 1500-voltsystem allows AET to propose multiple array confgura-tions geared toward cost and size optimization of the arrayfeld. Through this, we have been able to reduce materialand save cost by a penny per watt in some cases. It may not seem like a lot,but for projects over 100 MW, this can equate to $1 million in savings.

The move to 1500-volt system voltages is an effort to reduce
costs at a system level by deploying PV systems with ffty
percent longer strings and one-third fewer electrical bal-ance-of-system (EBOS) components. Ampt String Optimizers are already achieving greater value in 1000-volt systems
than 1500-volt systems without Ampt by doubling the string
lengths and removing half of the EBOS components.

Early adopters of 1500-volt systems are dealing withhigher component costs and limited product availabil-ity as well as the complexities of new codes and stan-dards associated with this higher voltage. Ampt is assisting with this tran-sition by providing bridging technology that allows 1500-volt inverters todeliver their full rated output power in 1000-volt systems using Ampt StringOptimizers and 1000-volt components. Getting full power from a 1500-volt inverter in a 1000-volt system lowers the inverter cost per watt — inAndy Fioramonti